Tag: love

A Mykonos beach bar at sunset, the lapping surf of the Aegean, I feel her leg under the table, her eyes have the next white wine spritzer written all over them, my soul raises an eyebrow but I am in the moment, I like this girl, two months it’s been. All this is happening at some moment in the future of our love story, but sat here alone in my flat in a reverie, waiting on her text, I feel the world unfolding as it should. It’s been a week. There is nothing so sweet in life as love’s young dream.

I wait, and wait.

Nothing.

She never does text.

No message ever lands.

Ya dun got ghosted son.

*

Four times this summer I’ve been ghosted.

Four.

A well-intentioned text, followed by nothing. Tumbleweed. Four times I’ve spent just under a week waiting expectantly by the phone, and like a message in a bottle floundering in the pacific, no word ever comes.

Ghosting, the process of simply not responding to somebody, is a fairly new term, and it strikes me a new idea. All sorts of things might have curtailed contact back in the day, highway men, bears, power cuts, cholera. But in the present day’s interconnectedness of everything, ghosting comes down to one thing. Apathy. Being on the receiving end of a ghosting isn’t great for your self-esteem. You go from white wine spritzers at a beach bar to feeling like a total creep. If you don’t even warrant a response, what must they think of you.

Turns out ghosting is a global phenomenon.

My summer of paranormal activity began 7,000 miles away in August. Waiting for a screening of my cousin Clara’s film I saw someone walk across the bar and my heart hit the floor. Argentine girls mayne. La bruja. Through some strange sorcery a few hours later her and I were driving through the Buenos Aires morning as the sun crept over the wall of the horizon. Outside my flat, in her jeep, I asked her if we could hang out again before I left. Si claro, she said.

A couple of days later, I sent the text. Waited.

A week went by.

Nada.

Was this some Argentine custom I was green to, I wondered.

Seems not.

The next ghosting happened mid-September. Same thing different date. This one had more legs I thought. This was the Mykonos beach bar girl. My imagination had got me that far, I thought there must be something there. We even had crisis talks on the phone, after a week. She was older, mother of two. Look I’m not sure you want this, she said. What do you know what I want, I replied.

I could be like that guy in Erin Brockovich, I thought, the biker dude, takes care of the kids while she’s out raining down lawsuits on huge corporations for poisoning the tap water.

We had our fair share of mutual friends, strange coincidences were peeking round corners. Was this serendipity or fate, either way both were playing a strong hand. I sent her another text. Days went by.

I read over the message. Tried to evaluate it. Too creepy. Too persistent. Restraining ordery. I didn’t think so. Questions poured down like the falling rain. I ran it by some female friends, she’s just mulling it over, they said. Day became night became day.

And our survey says…

*

My ex-girlfriend ghosted me.

That was number 3. I deserved this one. After 15 months of no contact, one night a little under the influence, my adrenaline overrode my good sense and I sent her a one word message, hello, written in our language. I kind of regretted it, but kind of didn’t, I didn’t really know what to think.

I mean what could I expect. Sending an ex anything after 10.30pm on a weeknight is straight out shady. Especially after that long a period of silence. What was she supposed to say. Oh hey. I haunted myself. In this summertime onslaught of all-out ghosting I was submitting myself to, this one was totally justified.

*

The law of averages would say if you send out enough texts, more than a few of them won’t warrant a reply. But I wasn’t bombarding random strangers with spam. I counted only three. Drunken text to ex-girlfriend to one side, the thing I find strange about ghosting is this.

Ghosting is the equivalent of asking someone a well-intentioned polite question and them, a foot away, standing stock still looking at you, and rather than answer, opting instead to pull out an enormous iPhone and peruse the Daily Mail website, in front of your face. That is one hundred per cent what being ghosted feels like.

Going cold on people is a human thing.

Having experienced it both ways, when I was guilty of it I think it always had far more to do with me and some crap I was going through than actually going off someone. Barring some loose behaviour in my early twenties which I spent years trying to burn the deadwood off from, I tried always, however clumsily, to explain myself.

I think polite rejection should be active, not passive. Because as soon as it becomes passive it stops being polite. A French exit suits one person only. Silence for the speaker might be convenient, but for the listener it’s an abyss that stares back with a thousand eyes.

Perhaps in the world of 58 WhatsApp groups and incessant notifications everything is more throwaway. But when mutual friends are involved, which these scenarios included, to have the manners to say ‘sorry mate, no’, is a decency. It’s not like I’m some letchy randomer on Tinder.

Who knows what is going on in the busy lives of people. We always think the world revolves around us. When actually it has very little to do with us.

The thing that kept me up at night staring at the sickle moon, was at what point was I being untoward. Because sitting there gazing at your phone as the days go by, what else are you supposed to think. If I’m the common denominator in all this, the problem lies clearly with me. Perhaps as my father jibed down the phone, I give off the air of tragic loser. And ladies can smell that. Maybe I’m just batting out of my league.

In Brazil once, my brother said he’d hang out with these two guys, the most player dudes he ever met. They’d go up to anyone. Nine times out of ten they got rejected. But once they got the girl. The most beautiful girls you can think of. There was a lesson, I thought. Put your chips down, risk rejection. The more you do so the less of an ordeal it becomes. For my part, as long as I’m not being untoward, I’m doing myself a service I think.

*

A few weekends ago, at a christening up in Derbyshire, a girl on a jet-black horse clops through the village as we’re on our way to the church. Our new neighbour! says Matt running up to say hi. In the afternoon outside the little marquee, we get talking, about healing, spirits, nature, wholesome stuff. Pretty cool conversation I thought.

Might text her, I say to Matt later. Do it, he says. Why not.

And our survey says….

Here’s a question.

Does that text warrant no reply. I don’t know this girl. But it doesn’t strike me as something worthy of abject discard. Even by my own lowly standards. I suppose she could’ve been going through some stuff. But ‘hey Domingo, was nice to meet you. Ah I’m sorry I can’t, good luck with blahblah’ is the work of 12 seconds. I think I’d prefer to live in that world.

I did some maths.

Or, I was being a creep. Or misreading the situation and getting my just-deserve. Or they were unnecessarily cold. Or it’s the universe’s way of telling me this was never going to go anywhere. Or I was being frivolous and they could sense it. I thought I was being harmless but maybe my energy wasn’t centred and girls clock that stuff.

*

Mulling all this over, I get a text from Alfie.

It’s a bombshell.

Here was my answer.

Not me, but the cold currency of today’s interaction.

People’s manners had gone to shit, through too many dating apps, too much transactionality. Where the feelings of the person getting rejected ceased to matter. However polite and well-intentioned their approach might be. What was emerging was a sort of ‘societal emotional barbarism’, as one person commented under a YouTube vid.

“

The problem is that, in our time, human relationships seem to become more and more transactional and detached from responsibility. It’s difficult to tell someone you don’t want to continue seeing them. So just ignore them until they ‘get it’. Ghosting is a problem of societal emotional barbarism and not just a problem of an individual’s ego getting hurt.

“

Armed with this new clarity I took a look back at my encounters. I wasn’t being creepy at all I don’t think. I was just made to feel that. If a summer of getting ghosted taught me something, is that I want no part in this shitty mechanism. I vowed to never be ghost-adjacent. To not make anyone feel that way, if I could help it.

This is all about projection, the stories we tell ourselves. Mykonos and the lapping surf and the white wine spritzer was a story I’d painted, about some hypothetical girl. But a more accurate account of the story or their character is that they didn’t have the manners (or the time) to reply. Same thing really.

The universe’s way of telling me these girls weren’t worth it in the first place. When someone shows you who they are, wrote Maya Angelou, believe them the first time. So what to do, reign it in, step it back, spend the winter in hardpound hibernation. Or put my cards on the table, go again, keep it moving.

Wayne Gretsky, the NHL demigod, said famously..

You miss one hundred per cent of the shots you don’t take.

I dunno. Having been shy and proud most of my adult life, I never had the guts to throw my dignity to the dogs. Now maybe I do. Would a summer of getting ghosted teach me to keep my phone in my pocket, to not risk rejection. I suppose the unused sub can’t give the ball away in the final seconds. If I don’t shoot, at the end of the day I can say I haven’t missed. What type of life is that. Like being trapped in some sort of purgatory. Not life, not death.

Stuck between two worlds.

Sound familiar.

When I am wrinkled and rickety and the pull of gravity weighs heavy on my bones and the autumn leaves of numbered years sway perilously on the branch, I will recall the summer of ’22 and the encounter with the New Cross blonde. I will remember it, like it was yesterday. Perhaps I will smile. More likely I will shudder.

It started like most good stories, in a pub.

The cycle over Tower Bridge the length of Old Kent Rd with heaving lung and thumping heart will be synonymous always with going to see my mate Tom. It was to his local The Fat Walrus I now beelined on a Friday of early July, skipping the lights on Lewisham Way, hanging a right.

Tom, his wife Louise, Skye peeking out from inside the realms of her pram, and some rotund bloke called George, Tom’s brother apparently, were sat in the beer garden, vacillating about the Prime Minister’s demise. I got there just in time to steer the conversation in a less vapid direction, told them some strange story that took place half way up a hill in Somerset. There are worse places to be than two pints down in a beer garden on a heady afternoon of summer in much loved company.

My round.

I walk through the pub and up to the bar. Behind an array of brass taps I see a mass of curls looking down at something on the countertop.

Hi, I say. She raises her head, sweeping the curls away from her face, which now reveals itself. I stop breathing. I stammer my order, my only thought is mate keep your shit together.

I did in fact think very little, just how she was so beautiful I could hardly see straight. I had no notion then, that a fortnight on from the moment time stopped dead for those few seconds at the bar, I’d be sitting here, a shell of my former self, in Y-fronts at 5.24am, writing a blogpost about it all. She poured the drinks. I made some comment about the heat. She smiled. I got out of there.

Back in the garden, I report back on what I’ve seen. Oh God, said Louise. Don’t do this again. I’m not! This girl is out of my league, I swear. So on we went, paddling the seconds of our afternoon downstream, watching our lives dwell for an instant in the present, pause, and pass into memory.

The conversation meanders its way back to Rishi Sunak, my stomach drumrolls and I decide to get some food. I approach, she smiles in recognition, I state my intention, she hands me a menu across the bar. Smile, wider this time. In me, same loss of balance, same heart skip, same pep talk.

*

My therapist and I skirted once the subject of bipolar disorder.

I don’t think that’s you, he said, it’s fairly extreme. But it is a spectrum, he went on, and you might conceivably be at the very shallow end. Over the years periods of depression had emerged alongside periods of intense high energy. This high energy, for the last month or so, had coloured my days. I wasn’t sleeping much, I was out a lot. The sun was shining, inside and out, lighting up my synapses, bouncing over everything I touched, heard, saw, all things glistened in the gloaming.

The best way to get to true happiness is to spread yourself out like a spider, thought Tolstoy, in a spider’s web of love, and catch in it ‘everything that comes along, be it an old woman, a young girl or a policeman’. Whatever Sprite had flown down to sit with me, the past month had felt precisely that, some spirit was pouring a glow out of me like a firefly, people were responding. My father said he’d rarely seen me so fragile. But I felt fantastic. Ride it to the last stop, said Alfie, just mind the dismount.

*

She was cracking up now.

Curls spilling over her face, incisors like a vampire. I was taking the piss out of the menu. Can’t you just write burger, where anywhere on here does it say burger. Look, burger sauce, she said giggling. Look, patty. Why not just fucking put burgers then, how hard can it be.

Lydi, she said. Domingo. I paid, went in for the fist-bump, drew back at the last. Dick, she said. Laughing. I walk back into the garden. Some strange sorcery is afoot, I tell them. I swear she was into me. Brows furrow. Even Skye looks sceptical.

Having not been seen in the garden for two hours, she appears, holding my burger, grinning. She walks back into the bar. My mates look at me in stunned disbelief. I know. I dunno what the hell is happening.

Louise has the why do I always have to watch you MeToo innocent girls in pubs look on her face. Five years ago a similar thing happened, a girl in a bar, younger, out of my league. Perhaps unconsciously the memory was fuelling me. Perhaps I just wanted to annoy Louise again. Perhaps it’s because she was unreal. But there was my proof, in the gurn on the faces of my incredulous friends, she had smiled at me.

Third pint.

Bosh.

Get it out the way, says Tom. I go up, she beams almost. Umm.. how about I get your number. She throws her head back. When are you leaving. An hour or so. Come back then. I do. Clear my throat the way you might when someone being talked about appears unexpectedly. She looks up. So… I say. You’re drunk. Nonsense. I’ve had four pints. If you want it, you’re gonna have to come back for it. I smile. What in like five minutes. No, next week.

Fine, I said. I will. Bye Lydi.

See ya.

*

A week passes.

I sit with a mate watching the Tour de France from midday Thursday onwards. Circa 6pm I get a voice in my head. It is time. Trouble is, I’m not doing well, I’m drunk, a little sketchy, the only thing that pushes me forward is the thought the cycle south might sober me up, and the fact that, as I keep trying to convince myself, I don’t really care. Better not leave it another week. An adventure beckons.

I get south. Haven’t sobered up at all. I somehow reason sitting in a neighbourhing pub for an hour over a pint will sort me out. It doesn’t.

I circle the pub on my bike doing intense breathing exercises hoping the south-easterly oxygen will work some magic. Fuck it. I walk in. She’s at the bar. Bandana and a transformers Tee. Hey, I say. She smiles. Drink? Yea. I try and banter but nothing lands. I sense my shoulders hunching, my face losing colour, I am hollow. I take my pint to the garden.

Down the phone, my new mate Will gives an extremely simple one word instruction. Abort. Just get out of there. I concur, but I don’t really care, I tell him, I really don’t. At that exact moment she walks past, smiles at me. Unmistakably. Fuck it, I’m going in. From the phone I hear a noo-… I cut him off.

Hey.

Hey.

If there is one element of this story that makes me shudder, it’s the sunflower. I fish it out of my backpack. She takes it, not entirely unhappily. Where did you get this. My flat, I say. Hackney. I came all the way. Oh yea? She doesn’t seem that impressed. Maybe her geography isn’t great.

So what you reckon? You said if I came back I could have it. She looks a little sad. Not sad, maybe the way you might look at a puppy who keeps falling over. You’re not gonna like my answer. Go on then.

Nope.

Sorry.

Hmm.

My week-ago-self would’ve cracked up, parried, protested, would’ve brought it round, would’ve sold her my prowess for recalling rap lyrics, sold her a dawn cycle down the canal, sold her a future, the two of us walking entwined down Lewisham Way listening to Springsteen. But at that point I was holding onto the floor. I’d lost before I walked in.

Why did I walk in.

I stood by the bar for a moment or so. She looked at me, began to pour a pint for someone, my shame barraged me, my hope whimpered, I gave her an exit strategy. Do you want me to leave? She cocked her head to one side, smiling sadly.

Yes please mate.

Walking out of that pub, the chill of some winter swept through me, above a dark presence hovered. For about a minute and 12 seconds I felt like a fucking failure. I felt old. Like me and the carpet slipper guy recalling all this in 2069 were one and the same. I felt like I’d never find anybody. I saw her in some pub with her mates, laughing at the story of the creep, saw a sunflower lying discarded on an unforgiving pavement.

Maybe all in this world is energy. You could be a 4ft tall Andre the Giant and believe your hype and get the girl. Perhaps the stories we tell ourselves are all we have. We begin and end with our own self-perception. Being honest, I knew it was never going to go anywhere. It was all ego. I couldn’t believe this girl had shown interest and my ego had goaded me. You’re a fool not to go back. But I was a mess. I had none of the flex I’d shown on the first meeting, my Sprite had gone awol.

She sensed it I’m sure.

And yet, once those 72 seconds had elapsed, I began to feel something else. The chill warmed up, the shadow departed, in its place a new emotion began to materialise. Something like pride. I’d done my best. I’d conquered my fear. I’d crashed and burnt, hard. But I’d gone on an adventure. Had something to show for it. Not much, but something. I cycled back through the New Cross night, and felt the Sprite soar down to be at my side.

It’s not the world’s greatest story, says Alfie.

Why? I say, offended. What better story is there. Look mate we’ve heard about you walking into a pub to see about a girl more than a few times. We get it. You’re not some comic book geek plucking up the courage to shoot your shot, you’ve done this before. You’re cooler than that. It doesn’t fly.

What are you talking about. Try living in my fucking head bro. The mingo you see is not the guy hanging out in my dome, I can tell you that. I’m scared shitless. Less so than you think, he says. We go back and forth over text chatting gas, the following morning the waters calm and I get a message.

*

The New Cross blonde.

Off she walks into the realms of an alternate destiny, as do I. She was unreal. Probably gets that kinda stuff from guys all the time, probably gets annoying. Probably no one as creepy as balding sunflower guy. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe she went to bed that night thinking that was pretty cool. Maybe she wasn’t ready.

Who cares.

It’s not about her.

It’s about me having the guts to do things that scare the crap out of me, and failing. And realising that success or failure doesn’t matter. The next day, Tom sent me the Roosevelt speech. Not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena, who if he fails he fails while daring greatly, that one.

You should go back for round 3, he said. Ha, reckon. I think this all has to do with the Sunscreen line. Do something every day that scares you. That’s the story. I don’t think I do enough of that. Struggling every day to preserve my emotions, to keep me from feeling something I’m afraid I won’t have the guts to feel.

Who knows.

I like what Gloria says to a befuddled Billy on a bus cruising through Venice in White Men Can’t Jump. Sometimes when you win you actually lose, and sometimes when you lose you actually win. Sometimes when you win or lose you actually tie.

I crashed and burnt. But felt alive. I felt fear, and met it with courage, felt desolation, and met it with pride. And came back with a story I suppose.

Might print it out, cycle back one day, leave it on the bar.

My mate Wilma went cycling once, met a bunch of Croatians on a hillside by a burger van where he stopped to eat. They crowded round him, interrogating this curious character on a bicycle. How many years? 28 he said. You have home? No, I rent a room. A few of them laughed. You have car? No license, he explained. Now they were all laughing. You have wife yes? No. No wife? I don’t even have a girlfriend. By now they were pissing themselves. No car. No home. No wife. 28?! They fell into hysterics.

A decade has passed. Wilma has the full house.

Me, I have an L-shaped sofa and a trainer collection.

*

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth?

I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I woke up this year and came to a realisation. I was the last man on Earth. The last one of all my male friends to not be married, betrothed, or a dad. I mean there’s a couple left, but they have their reasons. Me? I have no good reasons. I just woke up one morning and this was the state of affairs. Picking my way through a life of no compromise, supermarket shop for one, Netflix n chill for one, bedtime story for one.

How do I feel.



Fine, replied his denial.

Put Columbo on the case and he’d sniff something out. Coming to the end of a period of getting over someone, I suppose. A necessary time for being alone, build yourself back up into a normal human. My problem is these periods tended to extend themselves. They’d go on for years. Which came down to being too okay on my jax I think.

Putting myself out there felt like something I ought to do, never something I went towards. I might meet someone randomly and wake up thinking about them then maybe I’d try and coax them into a date. But my brain didn’t work the other way round. I couldn’t decide to date, book some sweet joint, and try and lure someone into the back of a van.

Love, the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Robert Frost

*

There are two ways to buy a jumper.

One. You wake up one morning and decide you need a jumper. You hit Oxford Street, initiate your jumper-crawl. Six shops later, with that horrible film of sweat only trying on clothes can pour out of you, you mull over your options in some high street sushi joint. You spring for the best of the six.

Two. You’re walking home after work, picking your way through those cobbled streets of Soho. You glance in at a shop window. A jumper. Staring back at you. You shrug, go in. Do you have that in XL? Last one in sale, your lucky day says the guy. You try it on. Boom. And yet making your way home that evening, you had no intention of buying anything. You might say the jumper came to you.

Am I too old for the jumper theory.

Closing in on 40. Not sure time is on my side. Can I afford to wait, do I go and buy the best one I can find. Maybe I’ll spend the next five years mulling it over. Because I’m a man, and I can? Does that sound fair.

And while I do I watch the furrowed brow of my mother, who’d love another grandchild or two, the barking of my old man who insists the only thing that can save me now is a kid. I think of mates who tell me quite seriously I’m missing out, I’d be a great dad. I’d like to be. Last time I checked I didn’t have a womb.

Only once in the last five years did I feel the unmistakable lifeforce to want to go and meet someone. And I walked into a pub on a winter’s evening and stumbled over my words but she was patient and it happened. If it hadn’t, I would’ve met someone in the coming months, I’m sure. That type of energy was pouring out of me.

I don’t feel that now.

How happy are my contemporaries. How hard are long-term relationships. How much do they let in existential angst, the longing to have done things differently. There I was complaining about some crap, and as Bobbie eluded her mother’s grasp and beelined for the dryer in the park loos for the fifth time in two minutes, Florence looked at me and said Mingo, don’t take for granted how much unknown there is in your life right now.

Jung warned that we are all living out a myth, yet we don’t know which one. Be mindful yours is not a tragedy, he said. What if I never meet anyone. What if I never have kids. The sweet empty life of no compromise. Would it be so bad.

In the depth of my solitude I admit I’d like to talk to someone about toothpaste. I’d like to show them something I read in a book. Ask them what they think. I’d like to go together and pick out some earthenware at Ikea. Try on a different brand of Y-fronts and watch them frown. Wake up knowing that what to do that day was a decision for two. I finally dig sleeping on my own, I tell myself. But sometimes the bed feels big. Sometimes the pillow I wake up holding could use a heartbeat.

*

The other day, on the side of a bus I see an ad. ‘Thursday’. A new anti-dating app dating thing, a whole night of single people. Rebound Week. It piques my interest. A night where you go into a room and know everyone else in there is after the same thing, walks by the canal and romcoms on a Sunday afternoon.

I set up a profile, go along to Nikki’s in Shoreditch, garms none too shabby, iPad in hand. It smells of bleach and broken promises. Seeing a few girls over by the bar I inhale the biting wind of destiny. Simone, she says. I’m with someone. I thought this was a single’s night. She scowls. I feel someone shine a flashlight in my face, could be the feds. About to do a runner I look again and see a mirror, the flashlight is a strobe bouncing off the top of my head.

I never made it to Thursday. Once it became clear I had to set up a profile to attend the night, I realised it was just like any other dating app I’d had the good fortune to avoid thus far. Plus who was gonna spring for a shiny domed 38 yr old with with an iPad sticking out of his pocket.

*

A Bangladeshi once explained to me from the front seat of his taxi how we have it wrong in the West. You think of love love love. Arranged marriage. It is the best way, he said. You have trust, respect, admiration. You build a partnership over time. Perhaps growing into love is a better way to do it after all. Join up with someone, work shit out. I heard someone say once that love is not a feeling, but an action. If you start with mad passion, at some point the comedown is gonna take you out.

What is left over when being in love has burned away.

The right place.

Something I’d stuck in my scrapbook years ago, the kind of thing you’d find on some cheesy Instagram story, had stayed with me. I liked it a lot. It seemed to be the kernel.

The grail.

Expend your energy on you, doing good shit, read good stuff, send your mother messages at the right times, go for dawn runs, smile at the dude by M&S who had a longer night than you, estimable people do estimable things, go out and have fun now and again, don’t beat yourself up about it, be the guy in the mirror you high Five, trying on the new shirt that looks fresh because the person wearing it thinks he’s worth something.

Make a habit of it.

And then imperceptibly, along some distant day into the future, perhaps something or someone will come round a corner.

And you’ll be ready.

Or more likely, because coal without tremendous pressure remains coal, in five years time when you’re still single you can hit up Thursday because iPads will be smaller in 2028 and no-one will give a crap.

It was one of the old Greek guys.

Back in the day, he said, we’d been cut in two, and our lot was to spend the rest of our lives in search of our other halves, the ones needed to make us whole again. That was it. As I lay there in the foetal position on the cold floor of my flat in a pool of tears, I felt cut down the middle. I hadn’t felt that kind of emotional pain in years. I thought I was too old for this shit.

Ever since Ross and Rachel popularised the break and it hit the mainstream, people have needed space to ‘work on their shit’.

I asked my mother what they used to do back in her day and she was like well they didn’t exist in quite the same way really. More a grave conversation followed by much lingering by the phone or the post box. So not that different, I proclaimed. I should think we were better at waiting, she said.

You know when you’ve stayed at home to receive a package of great importance and you’re waiting for the door bell to go so you can get on with your day and a message bleeps on your phone informing you that Guan tried but you weren’t home and Sorry we missed you! And you’re like Guan I’m here you tool, literally the only reason I’m here is to wait for you. All you have to do is ring the doorbell.

It felt like that.

Just me, sat there in limbo, waiting for this person, and the rational part of my brain reminding me that no matter how long I waited, nobody was going to come.

*

It wasn’t my idea. I went along with it because I loved her. And I was probably terrified of being alone. Nodded my head in earnest understanding of how space could be a sharpener, a great motivator, how we’d come back together stronger.

Lying there with a damp cheek stuck to the floorboard, I thought this is a first. I’d done the breaking but never the being broken and not that it was anything to be proud of but at the very least it came with agency. I typed something scathing meant to wound her and before I could hit send the phone slipped from my salty fingers.

Walking in the park with a friend one morning, it was pointed out in some ways a break could be harder than a break-up. With a door slammed in my face there was no option but to shuffle off. But a door half-open was confusing because the other side of it was hope, and yet through it the cold hot doubt of unknowing whipped me in the face like a harsh November wind.

One morning I got her dress out of the drawer under the bed and cried into it. I looked down at the little patch of damp and hoped the salt would linger there, so if one day she came back and retrieved it, to put it on rather than fold it into a box to take away, she would see the little salty residue and sense my tears and realise what she’d done.

It took me two weeks and four days not to cry. Strange rasping cries, tantrum-like, the sobs of someone who’d given up on language. But tears brought calm, like my brain was pouring water from my tear ducts to heal me, less a symbol of my sadness than a balm for it.

Then one day they stopped. I tried and nothing. I tried harder and they came, but reticently. And I had a thought. If I wasn’t crying, was this some sign of progress? I didn’t want this at all. I wanted to be half-broken and spluttering, because at least that meant being close to her.

I’d wake in the night half asleep to go for a pee and it would flood back and I would stand there alone in the dark, steadying myself with a forearm against the wall, disbelieving. But the ache got lighter. Some days I’d kick through leaves and feel my eyes stinging and think wow I’m not getting over this at all, and realise it was just my new nivea cool kick hydro-intense arctic freeze moisturiser.

One night I scanned her recently played on Spotify.

Were they songs of heartbreak or defiance, songs of missing a lost-love or moving on. I looked for Single Ladies and saw no sign of it. As I sat there in the dark trying to decipher what Idioteque by Radiohead had to say about the current state of our relationship I decided this was one of the worst ideas I’d ever had and resolved not to do it again.

Some days I’d just wait by my phone and stare at it, and a voice in me would be like bro… she’s not going to text. Think of something else. I stopped drinking. I was no match for the floodwaters of even a slight hangover. I’d get nailed on non-alcoholic beer and pass out and dawn would rouse me, clear of head and peace of mind.

Just off C_____ street, the road that swoops down through Barnsbury towards Kings Cross, is M_____ street, the one that bears her name. In the past every time I cycled to the library I would blow the sign a kiss or whoop in its direction, or if we were mid-fight I might scowl. But I looked the other way now, took a different route. Now I think of it this whole time was enveloped in a veil, a dreamlike veil, which made none of it feel real at all. The only thing that punctured it was an inkling of a recurring thought that came back again and again.

This is how you lose her.

When you’ve moped yourself to sleep, talked yourself out, bored your friends into metronomic muted nodding, paid your Colombian cleaner overtime because she gives you better advice than your therapist, when you’ve blasted Take A Look At Me Now so many times a neighbour slides a note quietly under your door, when your journal is an endless jumble of smudged repetition, there comes a moment when rather than dwelling on the fact that you are single, you have to get on with the business of being it.

And unannounced, it sneaked up on me. The same thought that weeks before had been so terrible now, although faintly, began to whisper its allure. The I made my family disappear Home Alone raised eyebrow moment.

It’s only me now.

Pause.

It’s only me now.

It came flooding back.

The intense selfishness. The sweet lack of compromise. All those years I’d been single and jolly enough and too scared to give myself to anyone. When I had no need to look for the other half of myself, because who needed anyone else to be happy, certainly not me, so fond of the lie that I was whole and complete as I was.

I would relearn to be alone. I’d been an expert once, all I had to do was retrace my steps. I would remember the hopeful mornings. The expectant nights out. I would run nothing by anybody, cycle as fast as I wanted without watching to see who was keeping up, I would make coffees for one, revel in film nights for one. And the 3am plods to the loo, pillows suffocated with cuddles, swallowed whole by Sundays of clawing loneliness. Slowly the wound that ran down one side of me would begin to scar.

Still I missed having the person you could tell the stuff to. I’d learnt to file a fingernail, switched up my Y-fronts, put onions in the ragù. No one else cared about this stuff. And the idle intimacies. The nicknames and in-jokes and interlinking fingers. The sounds of her sleeping. One day I went to the barber just so someone would touch my head. I picked up a conker from the pavement and whispered something into it and put it on a shelf.

But I was working on my shit.

That part was true. The weeks in the calendar I’d looked at with the fear of God in my heart back when each quarter hour crawled past were gathering pace. What did it mean about the depth of my feeling a month before if I didn’t feel it now. What did it mean for us, if she no longer had the power to glue my salty cheek to the floor for an afternoon. I felt far stronger but also further away from her. Something scared me. My severed other half, the one that had been cut from me, what if it didn’t fit anymore.

Again unannounced, morning came one day and I felt a shifting of the search coordinates. All those years of being single, selling myself the lie of being whole and complete as I was, I wasn’t all the way wrong. The dawn brought a realisation, that my search to find my other half was off the mark, because I’d been looking in the wrong place.

The last few days I’d felt a peculiar presence behind my left shoulder, like a warmth which became more and more felt with each day. That morning sat on the sofa in my white towelling dressing gown feeling the light pour through the big school windows caking the long wall and glinting off the frames, I was like shit.

What if my other half wasn’t her.

What if this other half, the one I’d been searching for all this time, this elusive other half I’d lead myself to believe was someone else, what if this other half was not actually another person at all, what if it was something along the lines of…

me.

What if all this time my other half was the one I’d jettisoned a forgotten lifetime ago, the half of me I’d never known, the me I’d struggled in vain my whole life to love. I didn’t even know I was in half, I always figured the cruel master of the horrid voices was the whole of me. Sitting there with my head rocked back, I wondered if the fear of rejection, the mistrust of being adored, the not being enough, it was all the cry of pain of someone who’d been torn in two, crying out for the half of them they didn’t know they were without. Of course I couldn’t find me, I didn’t even know there was a search on.

And this process I was living, perhaps the defining growth-spurt of my adult life, was me joining up with the me I could be brave enough to love. Coming into one another’s view, this new half stared back at me. It took you a while, I said to me. Here I am. Here you are. I’m sorry you were so sad for so long.

So what was this then.

Was this being whole.

What did this mean for her. Where did she sit in all this. Like so many things that demystified themselves over the course of that strange October it became clear that whatever happened between me and her didn’t matter so much. This Rocky fight-training montage I was in the midst of was not a means to get her back. Rather, it was getting me to my finest self, preparing me for any outcome, and tattered heart to one side I was the best I’d been in years. I got it now, her half was not the half I needed to be whole.

Often the wash of sadness would return, I’d lean on the kitchen island and shudder and spy my face in the mirror cracked and wet. Her chocolate on the newsagent shelf, the pavement where we danced one Christmas after cocktails, that dumb fucking song she always lost her shit to. I imagine it was because I was doing well, and the part of me that was bereft was fed up with being ignored and was clawing its way back to the surface. But it was a gift too. A reminder of how deep she was inside me and the sadness was a little whisper in my ear.

Her photos were everywhere, in frames around the flat, in journals, on my noticeboard. Nothing could be more sad than removing them, putting them in boxes, replacing them with something new, wiping the walls of her memory, and I was sure that nothing so sad could be allowed in life, and wondered if I should take them down.

The days drew on.

The way I thought of her now was a little different. Back on the floor of my flat all those weeks ago I couldn’t imagine a world with her not in it, and the pain of separation did feel like something being torn from me. But pain had become something else and I felt stronger and more upright. I loved her, and that meant being in love with her path I suppose. I was no kidnapper. It was quite simple, if she wanted to come back she would and if she didn’t what could I do. Looking down at the leaf wet and starfished against the cobble, I felt my heart hold its middle finger vehemently up to my head.

Love + love = pain.

The mathematics of love spew out some strange answers. I suppose lovers can get so enmeshed in each other they might not see how it is strangling them, and flying instead towards love like some holy grail they attach themselves to another like a grotesque Frankenstein creature without watching to see if the stitches take.

Would I take this love I’d made and pour it into something new. Or take the other road, of those so burnt by love they turn their backs on it, losing sight of all intimacies out of a hardened heart, walking in limbo with steps that echo like old memories, preferring to die than to suffer but never dying.

Who knows.

Weird that something so painful is revealing itself, annoyingly, to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Perhaps her and me figured out we were missing a part of ourselves and thought we’d take time out to relocate it. Perhaps along some distant day into the future, we’ll come back together as whole complete beings and fall into a tentacled embrace, and perhaps we won’t. But one thing is for sure, I feel less alone I think.

November, 2020

Your heart is in your mouth, you wonder why you bother, all the ways in which the next few hours will go wrong present themselves in a seamless highlight reel, an instinct rises above your fear and you keep moving, you’re locked in, you realise life is this, life is being in the game, this nervous energy is a sign from your gut you are alive, on you walk, you see the figure, the unsuspecting date, anxious, expectant, because your text-game is on point, of someone you now won’t live up to, who you’ve hoodwinked into spending the evening with.

First dates are terrifying.

They always scared me shitless. You wouldn’t know it though. When the lengthening shadows of my twilight years draw in, and I sit there by the fire with my patchwork memories, some less reliable, too smoothed over, too benevolent to the home truths of my past, I will cast my mind back and think, you know what, I’m not the last guy in the world you’d want to go on a first date with. Not at all. I gave it some unique flavour.

Meet me in Piccadilly, under the statue of Eros, I’d say. Baller starter move. With a knowing grin the God of Love would point his arrow directly down at us as we ambled up Regent St and hooked a left onto Heddon St. Having complimented the lady on her attire, I’d drop some casual knowledge about an obscure David Bowie album cover, and we’d proceed up the pedestrianised boulevard. If it was winter time I might make some passing remark about the chill in the air. She would concur.

I’d then stop, look her straight in the eye.

Cold?

It’s about to get a whole lot colder.

Emanating from the shadows, a neon haze would move across our periphery and reveal its source. An establishment dripping icicles of class, charisma, clean-lines and sophistication.

In both temperature and atmosphere the Ice Bar is indisputably cool. Upon entry one is handed a thermal cloak and gloves before passing into a sub-zero chamber, whereupon a ticket grants you a complimentary spirit cocktail. They play very loud EDM, and you sit on ice stools and drink your drinks and slowly get colder until your tumblers – also made of ice – begin to melt and your twenty minute time slot comes to an end.

I asked a Russian once if the atmosphere of the Ice Bar reminded her of the Moscow winters of her youth and she shot me a look I imagine her compatriots reserve strictly for leering through the Ukrainian border fence. Another girl found the whole thing so distasteful she insisted we leave half way through our allocated slot, which at £18 a head was a blow to both my wallet and my self esteem. But I couldn’t blame her. The place was awful, full of Italian tourist families taking selfies, the drinks were bad, the music was shit, it was freezing.

But it was also kind of the point.

The Ice Bar was something to laugh at. Something to do together that was kind of interactive, that involved a couple of drinks but was less neutral than the pub, that was weird enough for us to feel connected in spite of. I remember once to my horror a fully booked Ice Bar meant the pub was the only other option, and it was far more intimidating. As if over a pint there would be nowhere to hide. When you were as nervous as I was, the ice bar was a diffusion technique, an expert way to…

break the ice.

And strangely the real world seemed a lot more manageable once back in normal clothes amid a normal temperature, like the two of you had only just met but had already been through the ringer, and walking back across Regent St into the beating heart of Soho, it felt like you were meant to be together.

My mate Chuckles once proffered some advice. Bro, he said, on a first date always book a restaurant in the vicinity, and if things are going well covertly beeline for the joint in question and just at the moment you’re walking past be like… I know this great place, and duck in. It’s a classy move.

The restaurant was Hix on Brewer St, it had these beautiful bar stools, and sitting side by side one felt both closer and yet under less scrutiny. Life has taught us, wrote St Exupéry, that love does not consist of gazing into one another’s eyes but looking together in the same direction. I would quote this around the time we took our seats. Hix also had a bar downstairs and once dinner was done we could keep the vibe going by drinking extremely strong cocktails til closing around 1am. I’d then see them off in a cab, giving the crucial double-tap on the roof once the lady was sitting comfortably.

I must have done this first date five or six times.

Did I feel bad repeating the same formula? Every date was different, and my thinking was the smoother the logistics ran the better for both of us. I don’t think I repeated any of the same punchlines or got any names mixed up. I remember one girl asked me 3 questions in six hours, which I deemed reason enough not to go on a second, and another, an architect, asked me so many questions I made my excuses and hit the gents to compose myself. But I don’t think my company ever deemed the date a disaster.

As the years drew on, as the doorman at the Ice bar started recognising me and their weekly newsletter peddling subzero deals cascaded into my inbox, as my mates relentlessly ripped the piss, seasons changed and rearranged and one day the Ice bar went under, and even Hix started emptying, eventually closing its doors for good. So came to an end the chapter of my first dates. I also somehow got a girlfriend, which removed those evenings from the equation in the best way possible.

*

And so one morning, many years later and just a few ago I found myself on long-forgotten once familiar ground, feeling my way around the edges of a first date once more. There was nobody in my sights, only a strong instinct in me to want to meet someone. I was coming out of a period of unease and as tended to happen on the upswing, the heady mead of life was re-entering my body and I felt alive and happy.

In the intervening years the landscape of dating had changed. Introductions through friends were an option, but most had found one another by then, and the pickings were slim. These days, meeting someone involved the small task of swiping right on a glowing interface. That, or you went old school. The I gotta go see about a girl technique. Walking up to someone in a public place, facing the firing line of ultimate rejection, asking for a number.

One afternoon, sat in a bar opposite my house sipping a non-alcoholic IPA I heard a voice, and peering in its direction as nonchalant as I could manage, I saw her. Sharp intake of breath. She was unreal. Pouring sweat for half an hour I worked through a plan of action, something self-deprecating but not too creepy that would justify interrupting her and her friend mid-flow. I decided to bust home and put something cooler on.

Walking back across the road fifteen minutes later to seize my destiny with clammy hands, she was nowhere to be seen. But something had clicked into motion.

A few days passed, it was the week before Christmas, I was meeting a mate and his fiancée to hit their local for dinner. And in there, across the floor, was this girl, waiting tables. She was something else. I couldn’t keep from following her with my eyes, tracing her, the way she walked, how she carried herself, interacting with the revellers, gliding around the room. I spent two hours boring my friends talking tactics, and as the place was emptying, they went to wait outside and I made my move.

I’d written down my number on a napkin. I went over to her, motioning to pay, and looking up at me quizzically, she pointed to the bit of paper I was clutching with a peculiar agitation. The receipt? Nn-no, I stuttered, it’s on the table. And as we walked over a pall of terror drew across my mind, I grew faint, and lost it. In a last attempt to salvage some coolness I threw out a couple of insights about Christmas being a busy period, she frowned and half-nodded, and tumbling like a redwood onto a forest floor of regret, I flat-lined, paid and left. From the corner of my eye I could make out my mates’ faces pressed against the window, front row seats to the spectacle of my failure.

I pussied out, I said under my breath as I got outside, and without so much as a sideways glance blurted Happy Christmas, got on my bike and cycled home, dejected and full of defeat. But I didn’t make it. Half way across Well St Common, moving between the shadows cast by the beams of lamplight I heard the beating of enormous wings. In front of me an Angel hovered, stopping me in my tracks. I dropped my bike to the tarmac and stared. Be brave, came the voice of calm, if you do not have courage nothing good will ever come.

I went back.

Many months later my girlfriend told me it was the coming back that got her. If you’d asked straight out I don’t think I would’ve given you my number, she smiled.

*

I went back to the park the other day and saw the spot where I’d thrown my bike down. How weird I thought, a two and a half year relationship could’ve been snuffed out forever, vanishing into non-existence then and there in the space of ten seconds, on the basis of one decision. We weren’t even supposed to be in the pub that night. Louise had planned on cooking but was pooped after a long day, so the plan changed.

How arbitrary life is. I might’ve married this girl and I was two split-decisions away from never meeting her. How many opportunities pass us by, within metres and minutes of us. How alive is every day, every single one, singing with potential, a swirling moat of magic lying in wait, for our courage, ready for us to reach out and meet it without fear with arms outstretched.

The feeling I felt cycling back that night with her number, the feeling that made me want to shriek at the sky, having gone towards the thing I feared the most and made it, whatever the feeling was, I must go towards it again. I wondered how many new discoveries, interactions, ways of seeing and being in the world, every morning might bring about, with the vision of that feeling in my heart. The spirit of the unformed future, circling above us giggling and pirouetting in the air. What we call fate, said Rilke, does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.

I gotta go see about a girl.

Am I enthusiastic. Am I terrified. I don’t know. I know that I like myself more these days. I have less reason to hide, behind a thermal cloak and some loud EDM.

The other day, on a train, someone tells me how great her last few Tinder dates have been. I thought the opposite was normally true, I ask. Well yeah, if you want something serious I’d steer well clear of them, you’ll be disappointed. But for meeting new people and cool conversations they’re great. My phone can’t get on dating apps, I say. You’re fine. Stick to the going up to strangers getting numbers game. You did it once already, she says. You can go again.

This is the tale of a text message.

And the opposing hemispheres of the brain. And about waiting. It began a few years ago on a Saturday morning of Spring when I came across my friend Will standing especially morosely in the queue of a coffee shop. Knowing he was in the seedling stages of a romance I asked him how it was going. Awful, he replied. I was fine until ten minutes ago. What happened, I asked. I fucking texted her. Now I’m fucked. Every minute that goes by until she texts back is a complete hell. I just nuked my whole morning.

At some point in my past, my brain started working in this strange way that was hellbent on trying to link two ideas together. Like the time I realised the life-cycle of a leaf was a meditation on growing old. Or how my fear of police sirens was my inner child fleeing parental authority. I’d make these pretty banal connections and sit back and feel like Carl Jung.

But one tenuous link eluded me. I knew it meant something, but whatever that was had me stumped. I’d always kept my phone on silent, so I wouldn’t be bothered by the beeping, but I couldn’t work out why. My gut told me it was a dislike for loud intrusive noises or a luddite relationship to technology, or simply not wanting to be disturbed while I concentrated on something. 

But this explanation never did it for me. It was something deeper. 

And so I found myself the other day wandering the streets of Rome, in a state familiar to my mate Will that day outside the coffee shop, waiting on a text message. Feeling my day being eaten up by angst. When I was supposed to be taking in the beauty of the ancient capital of the world, all I could think about was this stupid little box of plastic in my pocket. And I just kept checking it. And checking it. And getting more and more angry with myself for caring.

My friend Jonty who was with me, and who I was submitting to the tortures of my uncertainty, told me about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The left hemisphere, he said, is the linear, problem-solving, logistical sphere. The right brain is more creative, holistic and eternal. With my mind still consumed by the lone antidote I sought for the unbearable pain of my life, I heard him say mate… just be more right brain about the whole thing.

Put your phone on loud. That way if you get a message, you’ll hear it.

You won’t have to check it all the time.

Like the Ignudi sent from the heavens on the Sistine Chapel ceiling not far away, the solution to my silent-mode question descended from on high sent by a celestial hand. It wasn’t about being bothered by the beeping, it was the opposite. I kept my phone on silent because of hope. As long as my phone was on silent, I held out a hope there might be something on it I needed to read, that I hadn’t checked yet. With my phone on silent, I was close to a message all the time, because silence meant its opposite, it meant everything. Ask Andy Dufresne.

Hope is a good thing, maybe even the best of things.


And no good thing ever dies.

I realised what I feared most was what silence stood for when my phone was on loud. It stood for nothing at all. For rejection. For being achingly alone.

*

Have patience with everything that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which could not be given to you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

*

So I took the plunge and stuck my phone on loud. So I could really know what silence was. That it was exactly that. Silent. And I could learn to sit in it. To love the questions themselves liked locked doors or books written in a very foreign tongue, and leave the answers alone.


Along many meandering conversations Jonty and I spoke of presence, and of being thankful for being itself. That there were really only a few things in life worth complaining about, and heartache definitely wasn’t one of them. The mere sense of living was joy enough.


One late afternoon in Rome as we sheltered in the cool of the apartment as the last rays of Italian sun found their way through the shutters, I spied my phone lying on the table, discretely minding its business, with its new functionality, ready to sound out if anything came its way. And I gazed at the shafts of light knifing the darkness, and felt a contentment wash over me. A contentment that came from sitting in the unknowing and the blessed unrest. To wait for this thing to come knocking, if it did at all, that I would hear its knock when it came.

If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, and I have not love, then I am nothing.

*

L O V E

What’s with this love thing. The most deficient word in the english language, the most complex, the most simple to them that know it, the most elusive to them that seek it, the most painful to them that lose it. The subject of countless books, songs, works of art, declarations of war, professions of faith, and BangBus porn-subscriptions. I remember asking my old man once if, out of all the big subjects in the world such as death, tragedy, religion, war, money etc, was love the most important. And looking at me like I needed a special-needs checkup, he replied of course it is.


The main problem with this word is that no-one really knows what it means. We all might think we know what it means. The trouble is that it means different things to different people. And it doesn’t help that when it comes to using it we’re pretty far from discriminatory. We bandy it around like snowflakes in a blizzard.

It’s the same four letter word, expressing joy for a bowl of Shreddies, a sunrise, Daniel LaRusso’s crane kick at the end of the All Valley Karate Championship, Snoop Dogg’s addiction to fried chicken, a particularly tasty apple, and the apple of our eye.


But there are so many different kinds of love. The Greeks broke it down into six different catchments.


Eros was for desire and sexual passion (which they saw as dangerous and irrational).

Philia stood for friendship – the lifelong type shared by brothers returning from the battlefield.

Ludus meant playful love, such as the love between children, and flirtation. The love facilitated by memorising the first twelve chapters of The Game and hitting Cheapskates on a Tuesday night.

Agape was selfless love, kindness, the love for humanity, what we might know as Christian love.

Pragma was the love and understanding established between long-standing married couples.

And lastly Philautia represented self-love, by turns both damaging, and if perfected, life-enhancing.

My quandary is about the love described in pop songs and sonnets, the romantic one.

A French man from the 17th century called Duc de La Rochefoucauld pointed out that some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love. I suppose he was asking the question: is love a feeling we put a name to, or a name we put a feeling to. Is it something we seek so ardently we attribute all sorts of minor dalliances to it, or is it something so transcendental that only when it knocks us sideways, and we come to on the floor in a pool of tears that the realisation dawns on us… oh this must be love then. Some people fall in love every single day, and some people never fall in love once, in a lifetime.

Then comes love’s declaration. Also a prickly son of a gun.

Alain de Botton writes about the inconsistencies of saying I love you.

If I told Chloe that I had a stomach ache or a garden full of daffodils, I could count on her to understand. Naturally, my image of a garden might slightly differ from hers, but there would be reasonable parity between the two images. Words would operate as reliable messengers of meaning. But the words I was now trying to say had no such guarantees attached to them. They were the most ambiguous in the language, because the things they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning. Certain travellers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare coloured butterfly, often sighted but never conclusively identified.

My father, who had waxed lyrical about love being the most important subject of all, broke Alain de Botton’s theory down into slightly less romantic terms. Love is not a river or a stream, he said. Love is a high-walled impenetrable water tank. Two people who love each other are like two high-walled impenetrable water tanks lined up side by side. Saying I love you to someone means nothing to them, it can only mean something to you. When you say I love you, your love is not a tsunami breaking the walls of a dam and spilling into their reservoir to mix in a new ocean of hyrdopassion, the dam is holding fast.


The love declaration is only three words coming out of your mouth, to soothe your own desire, to give it a name. Two people can love each other simultaneously, but they don’t blend together to become one. Like the magnetic force between two magnets, coming close but never quite touching. The two loves can sit there contentedly side by side looking out across the horizon, with just enough distance between them for one not to start magnetically flipping out.

Natalie Portman says something like this in Closer.

If this is all coming across on the cynical side, love is messed up yo.

As always The Wheels Of Steel has the right idea.

The Wheels Of Steel is keeping its head, when every bike around it is losing theirs and blaming it on The Wheels Of Steel. When every other bike spends it’s life before getting stolen seeking out the attentions of easy lamp posts, my bicycle once again proves it’s sagacity, above all in affairs of the heart. Look closely and you’ll see, my bike has given up on the lamp post.

Instead my bike has locked itself… to love.

If love is messed up, it’s also sacred.

Which explains pops‘ water-tank most-important-thing-in-existence U-turn. In a letter to his lovestruck teenage son, Steinbeck made a distinction between the subject of our love, and the object of love itself.

Being in love is about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Glory in it, and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

*

Perhaps in the end, the emotion the other elicits, is the closest we can ever hope to get to the other. Maybe we should cash our chips in and just learn to love…

– d r u m r o l l – 


love.